Zennia had reemerged, her weapons still holstered.

Except this time, she wasn’t alone.

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

—J. Robert Oppenheimer, lead scientist on the Manhattan Project

The Magic Word

GARETH WAS HERE.

His brother was here. Right in front of him.

Stand up, Leo told himself. Get to your feet.

He wanted to, but his legs felt like tissue. His whole body shook. His brain repeated the same thing over and over—that this was real, not a hologram, not a hallucination—but his heart just wouldn’t accept it. Not because it didn’t want to, but because it wanted to so badly. Because if somehow this wasn’t real, if it was a trick of some kind, that would be the end of it; that doubting heart of his would break.

Then he heard his brother’s voice. “Leo?”

The bounty hunter stepped aside, letting her prisoner come down the ramp, parting the crew of the Icarus, who stood equally dumbfounded as Gareth pulled Leo to his feet at last, taking him in, swallowing him up. Undeniably real.

He had been told to go find his brother, but somehow his brother had found him instead. Like every game of tag they had ever played—he should have known Gareth would catch up to him first.

Leo buried his face in his brother’s shoulder and sobbed. It wasn’t the first time he’d done so. It wasn’t the tenth or even the twentieth. Gareth held him like he did all those other times. “Shush. I’ve got you, Leo. I’ve got you. I’m here.”

“But how?” Leo said at last, trying to wrap his head around the impossibility of it, with all the time and the distance between them. Statistically there was no way that the universe could have seen fit to bring them back together. But then Leo remembered what his mother had told him, about how big—or rather, how small—the universe could be, all contained within the space between his head and his heart. “I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d ever see me again either,” Gareth said, laughing weakly. He took a sniffling Leo by the shoulders and held him at arm’s length. He nodded at the smudge of blood on Leo’s cheek. “You’re hurt.”

“Got punched by a robot,” Leo said, then pointed toward the corridor. “That one.”

“The one with the treads playing sad pop music or the spidery one it’s trying to put back together?”

“The flattened one on the floor who tried to have us all killed,” Leo answered. “It’s been a rough couple of days.”

“Tell me about it,” Gareth said.

Leo looked closer at his brother. There were scratches and bruises on his arm, a small but deep cut on his chin that had already scabbed over. His hair was a nest of tangles, longer than Leo had ever seen it. The bags beneath his eyes had not disappeared since Leo saw him last. The uniform was new, though. His shirt bore the standard patch, the same one sitting in Leo’s pocket, but you could tell it was fresh by the lack of holes or stains. He wondered where his brother had found it. Wondered where his brother had been. Wondered how he’d ended up in Zennia’s hands. He didn’t even know where to get started in the asking.